Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [180]
Independence in Bengal was an even more shambolic affair than it was in Delhi. A few days before 15 August the Calcutta Corporation renamed three streets in the city centre ‘Netaji Subhas Bose Street’, souring the occasion for the British. C. Rajagopalachari, the moderate Madras Congressman who had been nominated governor of West Bengal, also showed little inclination to respect British traditions. He entered the splendour of the throne room of Government House for his swearing-in dressed simply in homespun dhoti and cap. Perhaps it was just as well. On 15 August a huge crowd waving Congress flags and shouting ‘Jai Hind!’ invaded the building, stirred to action, it was rumoured, by Sarat Bose. They swarmed through the governor’s quarters seizing everything from door handles to table ornaments as mementos. The police removed them only after several hours by throwing tear-gas canisters into the building. In the meantime, the outgoing governor and his family beat a hasty and ignominious retreat. As Arthur Dash recalled it, ‘someone who recognised him jammed a Gandhi cap on his head and the last British Governor went out of Government House by a side door so crowned and with his wife waving the new Dominion (late Congress Party) flag. They were glad to get away.’ Dash also noted that the governor’s escape route was a stairway traditionally used by the low-caste sweepers who cleaned the building.38 As the two new dominions were born, Gandhi and Suhrawardy fasted together and prayed for communal peace.39 Years later the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri related that out in the district town of Barishal his father had kept awake throughout the night of 14 August with a gun in his hand. The disturbances he feared did not come that night, but they came soon enough.40
The Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar killings had already begun the slow tide of migration across the borders of the new states. Sensing that the partition would strand them in hostile territory, hundreds of thousands more had begun to move in July and August. By 4 August Mookherjee, the Hindu leader, was deprecating ‘the mass evacuation of Hindus from the Pakistan zone’.41 Independence and the disclosure of the Radcliffe award speeded the exchange of populations and the atrocities that accompanied it. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim League, Calcutta remained in India, so thousands of its Muslim population moved eastwards while Hindus began to stream westwards. Quite apart from the fact that many of them already had relatives and patrons in the west, the option of remaining in what Tyson called ‘a rural slum’ which, at one stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, had been made a food deficit area did not appeal to them. The government of East Pakistan almost immediately started to beg for rice from neighbouring Arakan, but this seemed a fragile lifeline as the Burmese province was itself wracked by civil war.42 One of the biggest problems was that the police and subordinate civil servants almost unanimously opted for the dominion where their co-religionists were in a majority because ‘a Muslim who elects to serve in West Bengal tends to be looked on, at the moment, as a traitor to his religion and community’, and vice versa. Poorer people threatened with minority status therefore felt that they would have no patrons who would protect their interests in the apparatus of the state and they too began to migrate. Though there was nothing on the scale of the events in the Punjab, minor communal incidents continued throughout the autumn, climaxing in late October and November as Hindus celebrated Durga Puja, the festival of Bengal’s patron deity, and Muslims began their own more sombre celebration of Mohurrum. At this time tension was especially high in Dacca and Chittagong, the latter the division in which Noakhali and Tippera were situated. In Dacca religious animal sacrifice by Hindus was banned